More than 7% increase in Air Travel Compared to Last Year

The FINANCIAL -- The International Air Transport Association (IATA) announced industry performance statistics for 2016 showing that system-wide, airlines carried 3.8 billion passengers on scheduled services last year, an increase of 7% over 2015, representing an additional 242 million air trips.

This information is included in the 2017 edition of the IATA World Air Transport Statistics (WATS), the yearbook of the airline industry’s performance.

Highlights of the 2016 airline industry performance:

Passenger

Once again, airlines in the Asia-Pacific region carried the largest number of passengers. The regional ranking (based on total passengers carried on scheduled services by airlines registered in that region) is:

A new feature available this year in the WATS+ edition is the ranking of passenger numbers in terms of nationality (citizenship). Highlights include:

US Citizens are the world’s most prevalent travelers. Some 810 million passengers traveled on US passports in 2016 comprising 21% of all passengers worldwide.Internationally, American citizens also took top place, comprising 9.5% of all travelers. This was followed by citizens of the UK (7.8%), Germany (6.5%), China (6.4%) and France (4.1%).

Domestically, US citizens were also the most prevalent travelers at 29.9%, followed by China (19.0%), India (5.2%), Indonesia (4.4%) and Japan (3.5%).New Model Airlines

New Model Airlines (NMAs), a classification that includes Low Cost Carriers (LCCs), accounted for 28.3% of all passengers in 2016, up from 27.1% of passengers in 2015. Network carriers account for 69.5% of total passengers while leisure carriers [2] contributed 2.2% to passenger volumes.

Measured in revenue passenger kilometers (RPK), NMAs accounted for 20% of global traffic, reflecting the concentration of this sector on short-haul flying. By the same RPK measure, network carriers accounted for 77% of traffic with leisure carriers comprising 3% of traffic, according to IATA.